


you're the only one i run to

by la_victorienne



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-17
Updated: 2009-07-17
Packaged: 2018-10-16 01:00:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_victorienne/pseuds/la_victorienne
Summary: it is very simple: her name is clare, and she works in a shop. until it's not that simple any more. 2,459 words, so read it.





	

It's very simple: She is a girl who works in a shop.

And that's it. It's that easy. Her name is Clare, and she works in a rather high-end London shop.

She got the job at seventeen – 2026, the year was. None of her family had believed she could do it – but that was Richard and Mum for you, always playing Debbie Downer now that Dad was in "hospital." But her Grace Kelly black shirtdress with the red peep-toe pumps and cluster of (fake) pearls were all it took for the manager to hand her a tax form and say "Welcome to Banana Republic."

At twenty-six, she's still working there – moving up in the chain of command, of course, and holding a full-time rather than part-time position – working during the day while she writes adventure novels at night. It's a good hair day, and her close-cropped bob always did go splendidly with the black bell-shaped knee-length taffeta skirt and matching waistcoat over a crisply pressed white Oxford. Add her favourite black patent leather pumps and even hanging trousers is a decent way to pass the time, though it would be better with a cup of coffee from a kettle that's been descaled in the last few decades. She's just considering whether or not it's worth it to try when the man in the blue military coat bursts in the door and starts shouting.

"Everybody on the floor! It's for your own safety!"

What the bloody – of course somebody chooses to rob the store in her first week as head manager. She looks towards the owner of the brash American voice, expecting a gun and a sack pushed in her face.

Instead, the man in the coat – who is really quite good-looking, now that she thinks about it – tackles her to the ground with a hiss of "I said, get down!" So, not a robbery then.

It's a narrow miss before bullets start spraying in an unseemly pop-pop-pop through the windows, and she wrinkles her nose at the thought of all of those pressed pleats in the newest shipment of bell coats, ripped to shreds in the line of someone else's fight. Army man stays on top of her long enough for the thought to leave her mind and stray to who this man really is, and she finally looks up to meet his eyes.

She wouldn't call it déjà vu, quite. It's a bit more than that – like a long lost part of her is finally waking up, like she's remembering a life she's never actually lived.

And really – when a dashing, attractive, American man is lying on top of her to protect her from a cascade of machine guns, looking down at her with those eyes, what is she going to do but reach around to the back of his neck and pull their mouths together? Especially when she's suddenly remembering a thousand other kisses much the same?

And he's kissing back, like kissing women on the floor who just happen to be dressed like they're from the forties, the _old_ forties, is just part of his job description, and they're lying there and her head is ringing and it's only when she flutters her tongue just _so_ and he jerks back that she realizes the guns have stopped.

In the end, he just whispers a single word in a broken voice before he's up and gone, leaving her swollen lips and the disaster of the shop in his wake.

_Ianto._

 

It takes her a while, of course, before she figures it out – but then again, she has the time, on paid leave while the store rebuilds. It is a good long while before the records can be unearthed – a long outdated website with shaky camera work, a recording of children speaking in unison, and finally, finally: a list of the dead of Thames House, June 9, 2009. The day she was born.

In the womb, she'd breached. At the moment the 456 (a "goddamn nightmare," in her father's words) had released a poisonous gas in Thames House, her own small heart had stopped for a full thirty seconds as her body wedged itself awkwardly in the birth canal before the doctors could poke and prod and turn her around, giving her air to breathe. As she'd slid out of the womb into waiting arms, a total of seven hundred and forty nine people had died in the MI-5 building, including a twenty-eight year old Torchwood operative ("bloody Torchwood," another gem of her father's) named Ianto Jones.

She might not have noticed him, but that there had been a camera feed in the room where he died, and his last minutes were recorded. And there, in the room, dying with Ianto Jones, was the man in the coat.

Except he wasn't just a man in a coat anymore, was he? She couldn't watch the video. She didn't need to. She knew – knows – every word and moment as clearly as if she had been there.

The scene unearths itself in her half-memory, settles in the back of her mind. She dreams the last words of strangers, feels her own lungs start to collapse and cave in, locked in the body of Ianto Jones. She dreams about the man in the coat – _Jack_ , she knows now – weeping over her face. She feels the pinch of trousers and the weight of a gun. She dreams the death of a nation, though she knows the 456 never did get any children. But Ianto didn't know that, and in the dream, neither does she.

When, one night, she wakes from the nightmare and Jack is standing over her, she doesn't know which one she is – Clare or Ianto, woman or man. But he's _right there_ and her body is reaching and she whispers his name and suddenly it doesn't matter which one she is, because it's Jack, and he's touching her, and his lips are on hers, and he's saying Ianto, Ianto, Ianto over and over again and she thinks, yeah, she could be Ianto for a while.

Of course, it's not quite that easy. Because before Jack is going to jump right back into the flow of things, he's going to need some proof that she is who she says she is, and the Ianto-part of her knows that. And sure enough, just as she thinks it, Jack pulls back and looks at her sharply in the darkness before turning on the lamp next to her bed. Clare laughs.

"What?" he says, equally as sharply.

"I just missed that look, is all. Your 'business before pleasure' look." Jack harrumphs.

"Well, you certainly sound like Ianto."

She sobers. "I feel like him," is all she says.

"Oh? And just _when_ did you start feeling like a man who's been dead for twenty odd years?"

"Since you drew machine gun fire into my dress shop," she counters. "Since I met your eyes," she adds. "Torchwood business, I suppose. Well, you won't have to Retcon me, as I'm bound to shake it off. Speaking of, how's Gwen?"

"My god," he says hoarsely. "It really is you."

"Yes. It really is." Clare-Ianto looks at him expectantly, the room lit silver by the moon in the window. The world, it seems, for all she knows of it, is so narrow there, in a cool dark room with clean white sheets. Like she and Jack and Ianto are the only people who exist. Even Gwen exists in her mind as an afterthought, to be considered in detail only when the past twenty years have been explained. Or at least summarized.

And summarizing doesn't seem to be quite what Jack has in mind right now.

It was like this once, when Ianto's body was still shaped like an almost perfect woman, but this is different. Clare doesn't know who is happier when Jack kisses her upturned mouth, when he ghosts his big hands down her small, small body, when he strips away the last traces of her makeup with his teeth and tongue. She can't tell whether it's her own body, predicting Jack's movements, reading his mind, or Ianto's, taking control of her limbs and simply letting her feel, too. Is it him or her who rests fingers on Jack's shoulders, digging in and crying out when Jack finds that spot below her breast? Ianto or Clare who says Jack's name like a prayer, like a curse, like a sob?

In the end it doesn't matter, not when his lips press over her eyelid, not when his hands squeeze just so at her hips, not when he fills her to bursting and stills for a full minute just to feel the way their bodies meet. She is Ianto and she is Clare and she wants this man and she loves this man, even though she'll never say it, not again. She loves clothes and coffee and Jack, god does she love Jack, especially when he remembers to bite the place where her jaw bends, especially when he remembers to make her open her eyes. In this silver-moon world she is Ianto and Clare and neither and both, she is every man and every woman who has ever been touched by Jack, she is every man and every woman Jack has ever wanted to touch. And they are happy and they are normal and she laughs when she comes because it was always like this and never like this and her body is so little and her joy is so great and when they come down off that ledge and Jack holds her in the darkness she thinks that nothing he says will ever make her mad again.

Until it does.

His breath is warm on the back of her neck, his body hard and solid behind her. She is drifting off into the deepest kind of sleep when he whispers his apology. For the things he did, the person he became. For what he blamed on Ianto being dead. For what he has never done well and will never do better. For his daughter. For Steven. For Rhys and Gwen – for the world. For abandoning the world.

"This is talk for tomorrow, Jack. Go to sleep. And if you won't, at least be quiet until I do. The bookshelf is in the sitting room, and there's a light in the table drawer." She feels him draw her closer and she listens to his breath still, until he is breathing almost as deep and evenly as she. And then she is asleep, and he is quiet, and she prays she will not dream.

Waking is easier than she thought it would be, not least because his warmth is still behind her, illuminated lightly as he reads in the dark. Dawn is creeping through the window, and for a brief, irrational moment she watches Jack glow from the heart of himself, nevermind that it's the rising sun that's the source. He is dark and golden in her crisp white sheets, not so crisp any longer now that the night is up, and she's afraid her cold fingers might burn him, someone so bright hot. That what she is – who she is – will make him someone unrecognizable.

"You won't always find me, you know."

He looks over to her and she knows what he sees: the smooth pale landscape of her back, curves and valleys, the dark crop of her hair, the light glint of her eyes. "No, perhaps not," he murmurs in response, more docile than she's ever seen him. "Do you think it's permanent?"

"I do," she replies. "Or perhaps bound to you, for whatever that's worth. It ends with your death or eternity, whichever comes first."

Jack does not look like he wants that kind of responsibility. "Do you know how you did it?"

That is one she cannot answer. Did she, as Ianto, brush over an artifact from a long forgotten land? Did it send her on an ever circling dream of rebirth, reawakening? Or do they simply defy humanity, her seed-self and she? As close to a moment unmoving in time as Ianto's own small determination could manage, without the power of the TARDIS to solidify his form? "Does it matter, if I did?"

"No." He puts the book down and reaches for her face. "No. It does not matter." He buries his face in her shoulder, breathes the smell that is Clare and Ianto alike. "All that matters is that it's you, and you're here, and I have you. I have you."

Yes. Jack has her. Has him. Has whoever he has and whoever he wants. Jack will call her Ianto, she knows, and she will respond. Every time she starts again, when someone says _Ianto_ , she will remember. When Jack says Ianto, her head will turn. And someday, some day, long in the future and long in the past, together, they will finally end.

 

 

 

 

_He's a girl again – or almost a girl. Over the centuries and over the bodies he's been a girl almost twice as often as he's been a boy, and he's not sure how to feel about that, except that it doesn't matter because Jack always loves him no matter what he looks like. But he's a girl now and not only that but a cat-girl, and if Jack weren't in this silly glass case they might laugh about fur in mouths and eyes that see in the dark. But there is nothing left to laugh about, now._

He met the Doctor once, when he was the first Ianto Jones, the first of many. It is strange to see him weep over Jack in a way he never would in the time of their last meeting, unknowing of exactly who and what he mourns. But then again, not so strange after all, because Ianto is weeping too, in her flying white cap and Novice uniform. Because Jack is dead, and this time he's not coming back.

Because he's finally found his peace.

Ianto wonders if at the end of it all he'll still start again, this time to live unknowing of all the lives he's had before. But like so much else in their long, long journey, it doesn't matter – to live unknowing is to die as he knows himself, and it is only fitting that he die here with Jack. Here with Jack, where Ianto has always belonged.

His nameplate may say "Novice Hame," but it is Ianto who presses his furry fingers to the glass of Jack's case, Ianto who kisses the place Jack's lips might be. Ianto who sighs, cries, and dies of a broken heart, following Jack as he always has, into the dark of their next adventure.


End file.
